Abstract
The discrete element method (DEM) can be effectively used in investigations of the deformations and failures of jointed rock slopes. However, when to appropriately terminate the DEM iterative process is not clear. Recently, a displacement-based discrete element modeling method for jointed rock slopes was proposed to determine when the DEM iterative process is terminated, and it considers displacements that come from rock blocks located near the potential sliding surface that needs to be determined before the DEM modeling. In this paper, an energy-based discrete element modeling method combined with time-series analysis is proposed to investigate the deformations and failures of jointed rock slopes. The proposed method defines an energy-based criterion to determine when to terminate the DEM iterative process in analyzing the deformations and failures of jointed rock slopes. The novelty of the proposed energy-based method is that, it is more applicable than the displacement-based method because it does not need to determine the position of the potential sliding surface before DEM modeling. The proposed energy-based method is a generalized form of the displacement-based discrete element modeling method, and the proposed method considers not only the displacement of each block but also the weight of each block. Moreover, the computational cost of the proposed method is approximately the same as that of the displacement-based discrete element modeling method. To validate that the proposed energy-based method is effective, the proposed method is used to analyze a simple jointed rock slope; the result is compared to that achieved by using the displacement-based method, and the comparative results are basically consistent. The proposed energy-based method can be commonly used to analyze the deformations and failures of general rock slopes where it is difficult to determine the obvious potential sliding surface.
Highlights
The deformations and failures analysis of slopes is a representative problem in geotechnical engineering [1], which have been widely performed in both scientific and practical research
An energy-based discrete element modeling method combined with timeseries analysis is proposed to analyze the deformations and failures of jointed rock slopes
The most essential idea behind the proposed method is the definition of an energy-based criterion to determine when to terminate the discrete element method (DEM) iterative process in the investigations of the deformations and failures of jointed rock slopes
Summary
The deformations and failures analysis of slopes is a representative problem in geotechnical engineering [1], which have been widely performed in both scientific and practical research. Many numerical simulation methods have been used to analyze the deformations and failures of rock slopes, such as the discrete element method (DEM) [2,3,4], finite element method (FEM) [5,6,7], finite difference method (FDM) [8], boundary element method (BEM) [9], material point method (MPM) [10,11,12], general particle dynamics (GPD) [13,14], and numerical manifold method (NMM) [15]. Wu et al [25] used the discrete element simulation software 3DEC to capture the basic three-dimensional characteristics of the landslide and form a post-failure structure similar to that observed in the field
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